Chapter 98 Just One Kiss Please

"I'll take that bet!"

A smirk slowly spread across Sun Jingwei's face. A poetic person would claim that it was like the sunrise over the ocean. Xue Ning was not poetic and found his smile a bit too sleazy to be compared to something as lovely as the sunrise.

It reminded her of snake oil salesmen, or cats that were stalking canaries for the kill.

Xue Ning did not like the thought of being eaten.

"Why are you smirking like this? It's greasier than an oil spill. Stop it." Xue Ning said, inching further away from him with eyes narrowed in suspicion.

Jingwei stood up, but he still didn't stop smirking. Instead, he leaned in even closer just so he could continue staring, the way children did to pretty fishes in aquariums.

He smiled in amusement at her wary expression, delighting in the way her eyes darted around and refused to meet his own.

"What's the problem?" She had a feeling that she just wandered into a trap, but she was too prideful to ask for help to escape.

"Seeing that you just verbally agreed to our bet, I suppose it would be gentlemanly for me to allow you one last chance to back out. I don't want you to feel like you were forced into it," Jingwei replied smoothly, but Xue Ning could detect the laughter in his voice.

He was offering her one last chance to retreat.

Was he looking down on her self-control? Xue Ning narrowed her eyes. He was mocking her! Just because she didn't have any real experience kissing, it didn't mean he could look down on her!

Preposterous. She'd show him.

"Like hell I'm surrendering! I've gone 25 years without kissing you, I can go another 25 years without. Don't think too highly of yourself!" She declared. Jingwei smirked at her patronisingly, and it made her want to smack that look off his face.

Then she had the great idea to lie about her kissing experience.

"In fact, I've kissed tons of people before you! You're not that special!" She said, with all bravado.

She wasn't usually a liar, but it was worth it to see the slight twitch in Jingwei's hands, the way his entire body jolted at her words, eyes blinking in shock.

It was Xue Ning's time to smirk. Finally, he didn't seem so smug, so calm and in control.

Jingwei's eyes had darkened in a way that made him look dangerous, and the clench of his jaw was causing her heart to beat faster.

Maybe she shouldn't have lied. But she wasn't going to admit she was a kissing virgin!

"Is that so?" Jingwei replied, his voice smooth as butter. However, inside him, an ugly green monster was raging against the bars of its cage, trying to get out. Xue Ning's lips had kissed tons of people, tons of ungrateful fools who probably didn't know how to kiss her properly, if not she would never have agreed to this bet in the first place.

She didn't know how good kissing could feel. He had to rectify that - he had to obliterate all her kissing memories that featured other people and replace them with him kissing her.

"You must have lots of experience then," Jingwei said, a muscle twitching in his jaw as he thought about other men pecking her full lips.

There was a faint thread of anger running through his body, and he tensely flexed his fingers. They longed to pull her towards him so that she would only look at him.

"...Of course! Don't look down on me! Your kissing isn't going to do anything!" Xue Ning declared.

However, her eyes subconsciously darted to his lips at her words, and she had to wrench them away before he noticed and began teasing her.

"Besides, I think you're the one that wants to kiss me more." Xue Ning said, as she watched how Jingwei stared unwavering at her own moving lips, as though they held the meaning of life and next week's lottery numbers.

In fact, she didn't think he even blinked since she agreed to the bet. Internally, she celebrated. Those houses were hers! This proved that no matter what, he was definitely the more desperate one.

"This challenge might be too hard for you instead." She continued with a meaningful glance at his crotch. Jingwei caught it and smiled at her pun, managing to briefly forget about the presence of 'other men'.

"Do you have too many houses that you can afford to lose them to me?"

He laughed; he had already lost his heart to Xue Ning. What are houses compared to that? How could he want to stay in a house without her in the future? What was the point?

"Thank you for thinking of my financial situation. Truly, my wife is a paragon of virtue. She deserves many kisses." He pretended to be touched, a hand on his chest, even pretending to wipe a tear from the corner of his eye before blowing her a kiss.

She snorted, rolling his eyes. "Someone needs to have enough virtue for both of us. And you can go kiss yourself. I don't need your kisses."

The less said about Jingwei's virtue the better. It was probably lost in a gutter somewhere, collecting dust and covered in grime.

"Are you sure about that Xue Ning? Just give me one kiss," Jingwei leaned in even closer, close enough that she could feel the heat of his body and his scent entered her nostrils. He just needed one, to prove to her that he was the right man for her, not those random unnamed guys she kissed.

She should have pushed him away, but her arms were frozen by her side, as though they instinctively wanted to reach out to hold him, but then her brain caught up and stopped her in time.

Jingwei had no such hesitations, his arms slowly wrapped around her waist, his hands resting on the small of her back to subtly push her closer to him. She slid into his arms easily, as though she had always belonged there, and her hands ended up pressing against his chest muscles.

Xue Ning flushed. Suddenly Jingwei was too close, and if she looked up, she could almost count his eyelashes.

"If you're still uninterested in kissing me after this one kiss, I'll concede defeat." Jingwei murmured in her ear. "Deal?"